'This book has truly changed my wedding, full of simple and affordable ideas to spice up any wedding on any budget - the writer clearly knows what they are talking about' Reader review You can say your vows in a catwalk gown so beautiful it reduces your mum to tears (and not because she paid for it). You can style a reception so stunning your guests won't believe you didn't hire an A-list planner. And you can sprinkle the day with personal touches that make everyone feel like you gave them special attention before they even got there. Without spending a house deposit on it. Honest. "This book has truly changed my wedding, full of simple and affordable ideas to spice up any wedding on any budget - the writer clearly knows what they are talking about."

From the heavily beaded tubular dress of the 1920s through to the body-skimming shift dress of the 1960s, this book looks at and celebrates the historic shapes, detailing and romance of vintage wedding gowns. Equipped with instructions, patterns and photos, it explores the history of wedding wear and explains how to make a vintage wedding gown inspired by historical fashions and trends. A beautiful and practical book, it will inspire everyone who wants to express themself through timeless and elegant styles.

A revised and updated edition of Marilyn Werner's classic thank-you note guide, essential for any bride or bride-to-be!

Flowers have been used in wedding ceremonies for centuries; fashions may change but their popularity endures. Today brides can choose from an ever-widening range of styles and designs including spectacular blooms, individual fantasies and simple, natural displays - the creative potential is huge when a love of flowers is combined with the confidence to experiment. This new book gives brides and florists a hands-on guide to floral designs to celebrate the happiest and most special of days. Packed with tips and tricks, it explains how to plan, prepare and transport the flowers, as well as advising on colour scheme and displays. Detailed instruction to techniques and demonstrations are supported by over 400 step-by-step photographs and there is also a complete guide to four seasonal weddings set in a church, a castle, a hotel and a garden.

Take control of your wedding planning (and budget) with over 500 easy hacks to help your wedding go as smoothly as possible-from preventing wardrobe malfunctions to making an adjustable seating chart. Congratulations-you're engaged! But, now what? As you start to share the news with your family and friends, you might start feeling slightly stressed about the amount of planning you suddenly have to do. But wedding planning can actually be easier than you think! With Wedding Hacks you'll find solutions to all your wedding planning worries and prevent any problems that you might not have seen coming. From finding cheaper prices online to dealing with difficult relatives, this book has everything you need to know to make your wedding day one you'll never forget (all while keeping your sanity intact)!

Want to have a wonderful wedding away from home? "Destination Weddings For Dummies" is your all-in-one guide to getting married out of town, giving you savvy tips on everything from making travel arrangements to hiring vendors to dressing the wedding party.

Fron Vegas to the Vatican, this hands-on, practical resource helps you arrange a unique, unforgettable wedding anywhere in the world. Focusing on the various ways you can use the Internet in your planning, "Destination Weddings For Dummies" is filled with Web tips, shortcuts, and URLs, as well as instructions for creating your own digital wedding planner. You'll see how to establish a realistic wedding budget and get your friends and family on board. Then, you'll choose the perfect location; from Europe to the tropics to the open sea, we've done the scouting for you You'll also discover how to: Get married legally around the worldKnow who, when, and how to inviteCreate your own destination wedding Web site and blogFit all the basics into your budget-- from flowers and catering to the rings, photography, and musicHire wedding pros from a distanceDecide on your ceremony's styleDress the bride, groom, and the wedding partyCommunicate your plans to invited guestsCompare wedding packagesSave money on travel arrangementsTest-drive your destination wedding siteOrganize fun wedding activitiesHandle various wedding emergencies

If money is no object, you'll also see how to host a blowout wedding and make a splash when you splurge. Whether it's a small, intimate ceremony in a Hawaiian garden or a large gathering on a yacht in the Mediterranean, "Destination Weddings For Dummies" is all you need to get married anywhere you choose with ease and in style

Fresh, artistic and cheeky designs for a new generation of creative florists.

Bold, modern and more than a little bit cheeky, Flower Porn ditches the traditional floral bouquets for designer arrangements that you can recreate at home. Kai Kaimins, founder of East London florist My Lady Garden, shows you how to fill your home or office with eye-catching, Instagram-worthy arrangements. By following her flower recipes, you'll unlock the secrets of colour theory and get up close and personal with a huge array of blooms, season by season.

Complete with an essential chapter on floristry techniques, this book will show you how to choose the best flowers for each arrangement, and prepare each stem to make sure that your bold creations will last.

Float into the pages of this flirty flower book to explore:

• Four chapters of flower arrangements are arranged by season, with each project presented as a recipe, complete with a food-related heading
• A preliminary chapter will cover the key techniques and processes readers will need to create each flower recipe
• vivid photography and modern layouts that capture Kai's style and the My Lady Garden aesthetic.

There's nothing quite like a bouquet of flowers, and there is absolutely nothing at all like the bouquets, arrangements and stunning displays in Flower Porn to bring beauty to a room. A must-have addition to the library of every flower-arranger - whether you're discovering the art form for the first time, or already a professional florist looking for new ideas for the business, Flower Porn has something for everyone to love.

Your wedding day is one of the most memorable of your life--especially if you're the bride. From unique proposals to hilarious and touching tales of actual ceremonies and receptions, this book will inspire anyone looking ahead to the big day.

The perfect book of couples activities and date night ideas to make every day feel romantic! Sure, you could buy some roses.Yes, you could cook an elegant romantic dinner.Of course, you could give a heart-shaped box of chocolates. But sometimes you want to do more than that. Sometimes you want to show just how much you really care, how much passion you really feel, and how much more your partner means to you than absolutely anything else. Packed with unique suggestions, easy gestures, and thoughtful gift ideas, 1001 Ways to Be Romantic is a romance kit "worth memorizing" (Boston Herald). It's a must-have for anyone, in any relationship (whether dating, engaged, or married for 50+ years!) who wants to spark some more love in their lives. The perfect adventure book for couples, wedding anniversary gift, or marriage and date night idea vault, this is a #1 bestseller with over 6 million copies sold that delivers the romance time and time again. You'll find: Little things you can do every dayBig ideas for when you want to go all outHow to be romantic without spending a dimeHow to really go to town when money is no objectTons of resources, including websites, online shopping, places to go, music, movies, and much, much more

This is a guide for prospective best men which aims to answer the anxieties about making the speech. It offers advice on speech-making essentials, great openings, strong middles, big finishes, plus putting it all together and delivering the speech itself. Contents: Learning the essentials; Saying it with humour; Being congratulatory and optimistic; Finding the ideal beginning and ending; Putting it together; Delivering your speech; Stories, jokes and one-liners for your speech; Sample speeches.

From sitcoms and soap operas to talk shows and movies, Americans are in love with the idea of a white wedding. The happy bride and groom smile from the covers of fashion and entertainment magazines, and appear in TV commercials to sell everything from life insurance to antacid. Fascinated by this national obsession, Chrys Ingraham peers behind the veil to question the meaning of weddings in American popular culture. What she finds is nothing less than a wedding industrial complex. The wedding industry does a thriving business with annual revenues in excess of 30 billion dollars. The average cost of a wedding is over $19,000, with 2.4 million couples getting married each year. White Weddings is the first book to investigate the underside of this recession-proof industry, exposing how weddings are used to sell a heterosexual fairy tale. Ingraham draws on popular media, such as bridal magazines, children's toys, feature films, television, and advertising to reveal how they regulate gender, sexuality, race, and class. relies on romantic and sacred notions of heterosexuality to maintain the illusion of normalcy. This entertaining and insightful book will make you think twice about ever wanting to catch the bouquet.

With this book you really can have a fabulous wedding that you'll remember forever - and still save hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. In this short, easy-to-read guide, an experienced professional wedding planner gives you the benefit of her advice. With the practical help of useful checklists you will find out how to plan and manage the perfect day, including: - Planning and managing the hen and stag parties. - Choosing and booking the venue. - Planning and organising the drinks and catering, cars and drivers, photographs, flowers, DJs, invitations, etc. - Choosing the bride's and bridesmaids' dresses. This book will make sure you keep all the romance in your special day without the stress of costs spiralling out of control.

At Last! A Comprehensive Guide to Good Grooming
Gone are the days when you could sit back and let your fiancee plan the entire wedding. Today's grooms have countless tasks to perform, from hiring the entertainment and planning the rehearsal dinner to buying the wedding bands and comforting hysterical family members.
Fortunately, "The Groom's Instruction Manual" is here to answer all of your most challenging questions: How do I handle feuding relatives? What should I look for in a good wedding photographer? Why does my fiancee seem stressed out all the time? Whatever your concerns, you'll find the answers here--courtesy of author and veteran groom Shandon Fowler.

Named "Best of the Best from the University Presses" for 2007 by the American Library AssociationWeddings today are a $70-billion business, yet no one has explained how the industry has become such a significant component of the American economy. In "Brides, Inc.," Vicki Howard goes behind the scenes of the various firms involved--from jewelers to caterers--to explore the origins of the lavish American wedding, demonstrating the important role commercial interests have played in shaping traditions most of us take for granted.Howard reveals how many of our customs and wedding rituals were the product of sophisticated advertising campaigns, merchandising promotions, and entrepreneurial innovations. Tracing the rise of the wedding industry from the 1920s through the 1950s, the author explains that retailers, bridal consultants, etiquette writers, caterers, and many others invented traditions--from the diamond engagement ring and double-ring ceremony to the gift registry to the package-deal catered affair. These businesses and entrepreneurs, many of them women, transformed wedding culture and set the stage for today's multibillion-dollar industry.The wedding industry began to take shape between the 1920s and the 1950s. Bridal magazine editors and etiquette writers, jewelers, department store window display artists, bridal consultants, fashion designers, and caterers invented new consumer rites and promoted higher standards of wedding consumption. Claiming ties with "ancient customs" and various historical periods, the wedding industry promoted new goods and services as timeless and unchanging. It introduced new ring customs and wedding apparel fashions, and "modern" services, such as gift registries that rationalized gift customs, bridal salons that saved time and made wedding planning more efficient, and wedding packages that standardized ceremonies and reception celebrations.During World War II, the traditional white wedding grew even more prevalent as jewelers and bridal gown manufacturers successfully sought exemptions from wartime restrictions, linking the diamond engagement ring, the double-ring ceremony, and the formal white wedding gown with democracy and American prosperity. By the 1950s, the wedding industry had made the formal white wedding tradition a part of a new cult of marriage and the modern American Dream.Entertaining and informative, "Brides, Inc." reveals the origins and development of this most exemplary American enterprise and brings the story up to the present with a discussion of such new phenomena as David's Bridal and the gay wedding industry.

There is much tradition and folklore surrounding weddings. Generation after generation, cultures have developed rituals, superstitions and events to make this day a special one to remember. Learn about the world's most expensive wedding dress, where exactly the idea of bachelor parties came from and cultural practices the world over.

What's the preferred way of wording your invitation? How should guests at the wedding dinner be seated? What do you say to people who ask to bring their (uninvited) children to the reception-or, scarier still, to your prospective mother-in-law when she picks out the World's Ugliest Dress to wear on your big day?Brides-to-be have a lot on their minds, including making sure that everything connected with the wedding is done the "right way." But nowadays few people are adequately schooled in the do's and don'ts of proper etiquette-and that's where Simple Stunning Wedding Etiquette comes to the desperately needed rescue.This newest volume in Karen Bussen's Simple Stunning Wedding series-whose four previous books total more than 130,000 copies in print-is the perfect marriage between the timeless and the new. Bussen celebrates the beloved rituals (cake-cutting, toasts) that are well worth preserving, while dispensing with outmoded rites (the garter toss) best left by the wayside. And Bussen's guide goes beyond other wedding etiquette handbooks by dealing sensitively with the sometimes-fraught issues (divorced parents, second marriages, blending religious traditions) so crucial to contemporary wedding planning.

Highly acclaimed wedding photographer Mark Cleghorn discusses how to photograph all types of weddings. It offers invaluable advice on the best poses and explains the full-post production process. It is packed with inspirational photographs and pro tips throughout. Mastering Wedding Photography is packed with expert advice and top tips on capturing those treasured memories. Acclaimed wedding photographer, Mark Cleghorn offers comprehensive information on choosing equipment, manipulating the light, taking candid shots and organizing formal portraits, as well as clearly explaining all the key photographic techniques. Mark also gives plenty of suggestions on what to capture before, during and after the ceremony and how to go about it, plus tips for post-production.